“Portugal is an international benchmark and should maintain this position”
Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa addressed this Monday the presentation of New Year greetings by the Diplomatic Corps accredited in Portugal.
“Portugal is today an international reference and everything is done and must be done so that nothing limits what constitutes a unique position that must be maintained and reinforced,” said Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa on Monday before the diplomatic corps at a meeting at the National Palace of Ajuda, in Lisbon.
The President of the Republic stressed that Portugal’s position as an international reference “is projected in foreign policy” and is “characterized by continuity and unity“.
“The presidents, the parliaments and the governments of different shades go by and the foreign policy remains the same, faithful in the friendships, firm in the alliances, trustworthy in the partnerships“, maintained the head of State.
“What Portugal is this that welcomes you with the serene experience of almost 900 years of history and also with the hospitable warmth of a surprising youth of spirit?” He asked, rhetorically, before describing the country as a “platform between cultures, civilizations, oceans and continents, made by those who, as Sophia de Mello Breyner used to say, ‘sailed without the map they made’ “.
President Marcelo also considered that the exit from the crisis, fiscal rigour, public debt management, growth and employment “exceeded expectations” in 2018. “Looking at 2018, we can fairly say that, in it, the fiscal crisis, public debt, growth, employment, government stability, external economic and financial credibility, ” he said.
In his view, “the weight of the ‘outside’ was more varied, the resilience of the network of social solidarity, and even successes of volume such as the Web Summit for another ten years, qualification of tourism, new generations of exports, attractiveness of people and investments coming from major economies “also” exceeded expectations last year“.
“At the same time, there has been little attention to the need for demographic inversion, to the updating of certain institutions, to the construction of explicit regime consensuses, to the prevention of anti-systemic appeals that are so alluring,” he warned.
At the beginning of his speech, President Marcelo said that the celebrations of Portugal Day in 2019 will start in Portalegre and then continue with the Portuguese and Portuguese residents in Cape Verde. In fact, on December 31, the head of state announced that Cape Verde’s city of Praia, in 2019, will celebrate the celebrations of June 10 in Cape Verde.
In 2016, the year he took office as head of state, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa launched an unprecedented model of celebrations of the Day of Portugal, Camões and Portuguese Communities, agreed with the Prime Minister, António Costa, in which the celebrations begin in national territory and extend to a foreign country with Portuguese immigrant communities.
This year, Portugal Day was celebrated in Lisbon and Paris, in 2017 the celebrations were held in Porto and in the Brazilian cities of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, and in 2018 they were divided between Ponta Delgada in the Azores and Boston and Providence, in the United States of America.
